I am not Stephen King

 Patience is not one of my strong points. That’s why I loved Stephen King’s advice from his memoir, On Writing. Basically he says when writing a book you should churn out two thousand words a day and keep going until the book is finished.

Charged with enthusiasm over how much I could achieve at that pace I publicly announced my intention on facebook that I wanted to enter my book into a memoir competition on September 22^nd. Nothing like a bit of social pressure to help motivate you toward achieving a goal.

Seriously, how hard could it be? Very hard it turns out. Much harder than I expected.

Some days the words pour out of me and I am filled with a passionate drive, knowing that this book will be finished and I will be published. Other days, when I fall well short of my self imposed targets, I wonder what level of delusion has possessed me to attempt this task.

I wish I was one of those people who could get up at four in the morning to dash off a couple of thousand words before heading to the gym and then home in time to bake nutritious goodies for lunchboxes. But honestly, just reading about those sort of lives makes me so tired I want to go straight to bed with a cup of tea and a good book.

I am still wobbling around trying to find a way to fit in writing my book, engaging with twitter, reading books on writing, reading books not on writing, occassionally writing my blog and always looking after the kids.

What I have come to realise during my stumbling attempt at first book writing is that I am not Stephen King. I know. A shock, right? Still, I am determined to do justice to the story I am telling. For me that involves writing a first draft (as quickly as I can manage), resting the book for a while, then editing, then sending it out for feedback, incorporating feedback, resting again, then reading and editing until I am satisfied that the book is as good as I can get it.

None of these processes can be worked around. All of them take time. So I am just going to breathe and keep on going. Oh, and I will try to write blogs more regularly. After the school holidays. Deep breath. I think this book might be teaching me about patience.